Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman Read Free Book Online Page A

response, Deutch fired two longtime and well-liked agency veterans and ordered a top-to-bottom review of the CIA’s books. Cohen and his team began examining the backgrounds of every asset on the CIA’s payroll. Those with too much baggage, whose unsavory histories outweighed their value to the United States, were cut loose. The “asset scrub,” as it was known, was tantamount to heresy. CIA officers made their reputations by recruiting informants. Now headquarters was opening the books on their careers’ work and dismissing their accomplishments. The fact that Cohen, an analyst, was running it made it even worse.
    Deutch, Cohen, and the agency’s lawyers came up with new rules for recruiting. If you wanted to recruit someone with blood on his hands, you needed approval from headquarters. It was never intended to be an outright prohibition; it was supposed to provide some review before the CIA put a torturer or a terrorist on the payroll. But in the field, coming on the heels of Guatemala, the message was clear: Don’t bother recruiting anyone with a distasteful history.
    The asset scrub made Cohen’s workforce risk averse. At the CIA, those words are the ultimate insult, a shorthand way of saying that the agency doesn’t have the stomach for difficult operations. Cohen saw it as the result of a broken system. As soon as an operation went bad, Congress and the White House were quick with recriminations. Fear of being second-guessed led to stifling deliberations. The way Cohen saw it, by subjecting covert operations to review by a battery of lawyers, the government was signaling a clear disapproval for such missions. 12
    As budgets were cut and agency recruits slowed to a trickle, Cohen earned a new name that would stick with him long after he left the CIA. To his employees, he was often known as Fucking David Cohenor, in the alternative, David Fucking Cohen. He knew that carrying out Deutch’s directives made him unpopular. He didn’t care. A good leader was decisive; someone who made tough calls even when they were unpopular. But he came to believe that Deutch had made things harder by speaking so publicly about his intentions to overhaul the agency. The lesson Cohen took away was that if you want to make changes, do it. Strong leaders don’t make changes by talking about them in the newspaper ahead of time. 13
    It would prove to be a disastrous time to make budget cuts and stop taking risks. The roots of Islamic terrorism were taking hold. The 1993 truck bombing, carried out by Muslim terrorists with the same grievances that would later inspire al-Qaeda, proved that terrorists could strike inside America. As the United States focused more on spy satellites and less on old-fashioned spy craft, Osama bin Laden was gaining power and influence.
    Instead of devising a grand plan to address this changing world, Cohen was forced to spend much of his time fending off cuts or at least directing the ax to lower-priority programs. He fought efforts to close overseas stations and defeated attempts to absorb Alec Station’s money into the general counterterrorism budget, where it would undoubtedly disappear. Cohen recognized that the CIA had little coherent counterterrorism strategy, but that hardly mattered. With limited Arabic language skills, few new recruits, and a reluctance to hire spies, the agency was ill equipped to carry out a strategy even if it had one.
    For its part, Alec Station made progress despite the cuts. The team quickly learned that bin Laden was running his own terrorist group and was linked to several attacks against US citizens, including the 1992 bombing of a hotel where US military personnel were staying in Yemen and the 1993 shootdown of Black Hawk helicopters on a peacekeeping mission in Somalia. By the fall of 1998, two years after the team was formed, the CIA had bin Laden in its sights and was rehearsing a covert operation to swoop into Afghanistan and capture him. 14
    Cohen would not be around